e-Prescribe gets a federal push
By Phillip Fiorini, Purdue Marketing & Media
A federal measure that encourages using electronic systems for prescriptions beginning in January will help deliver safer and more efficient care to patients while also cutting costs.
A federal pilot project, which runs through 2013, awards doctors additional money from Medicare if they use electronic prescribing systems, known as e-prescribing. Medicare will give doctors a 2 percent bonus on top of their fee for e-prescribing in 2009 and 2010. In 2011 and 2012, the bonus will drop to 1 percent, and in 2013, the bonus will drop again to 0.5 percent.
“This bonus program encouraging e-prescribing will make the system more efficient, streamline the prescription process and help reduce medical errors,” said Vincent Duffy, a Purdue professor of industrial engineering and researcher at Discovery Park’s Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering. “When you consider 3 billion prescriptions are written annually, this measure could have a significant impact on U.S. health care.”
According to the Institute of Medicine, 1.5 million Americans are injured every year by drug errors, and analysts say approximately 7,000 U.S. deaths occur each year because of such errors. Another study found that each year pharmacists make more than 150 million phone calls to doctors to clarify what was written on the paper prescription.
“Some of these errors can be traced to handwriting illegibility, wrong dosing, missed drug interactions or drug-allergy reactions,” Duffy said. “This area constitutes one of the largest paper-based processes in the United States. The evidence is clear that the writing of prescriptions can be streamlined and made more efficient by using an e-prescribing system.”
Duffy and his research team are developing a framework by which physician adoption of e-prescribing systems can be predicted and evaluated. The team is using human performance engineering to determine categories of critical technology, human factors and organizational characteristics that influence physicians’ willingness to adopt an e-prescribing system.
“Less than 20 percent of physicians currently use e-prescribing, even though more than 70 percent of pharmacies are capable of receiving electronic prescriptions,” Duffy said.
back to top
CEO of National League of Nursing stresses the growing need for nursing educators
RCHE’s 2009 Speaker Series kicked off with Beverly Malone, CEO of the National League of Nursing, who spoke to a crowd of Purdue faculty, staff, and students, as well as community healthcare providers about the pressing need for nursing educators.
The U.S. expects a 27 percent increase in nursing jobs by 2012, she said. However, nursing education programs are having difficulty keeping up with the demand and are sometimes forced to turn away applicants due to a lack of space in the programs. 2008 marked an eight-year low in nursing program growth, she said.
This is largely due to not enough faculty, she said, with more than 76 percent of schools surveyed by the National League of Nursing citing this as problem. Only half a percent of those in nursing program grads across the country are doctoral grads -- those individuals more likely to take on academic leadership roles. Meanwhile, three-quarters of the current nursing faculty members across the country are expected to retire by 2019.
Malone stressed the importance of developing nursing educators who can help educate the next generation of nurses.
About Dr. Malone
Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN; CEO, National League for Nursing, began her nursing career with a first degree in nursing from the University of Cincinnati in 1970. She combined further study with clinical practice, a master’s in psychiatric nursing and she received her doctorate in clinical psychology in 1981.
Her career has mixed policy, education, administration and clinical practice. Dr. Malone has worked as a surgical staff nurse, clinical nurse specialist, director of nursing, and assistant administrator of nursing. During the 1980s she was dean of the School of Nursing at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. In 1996 she was elected for two terms as president of the American Nurses Association (ANA), representing 180,000 nurses in the USA. In 2000, she became deputy assistant secretary for health within the US Department of Health and Human Services.
In February 2007, Dr. Malone took up her appointment as chief executive officer of the National League for Nursing in New York. Dedicated to excellence in nursing, the NLN is the premier organization for nurse faculty and leaders in nursing education offering faculty development, networking opportunities, testing and assessment, nursing research grants, and public policy initiatives to its 27,000 individual and 1,200 institutional members.
back to top
2009’s first community challenge — Food for Pounds
Is one of your New Year’s resolutions to get fit or lose weight? Or would you like to help out the Food Finders Food Bank? If either applies to you, RCHE has the program for you. We’re kicking off 2009 with “Food for Pounds.”
How it works
There are two ways to participate — the food or the pounds. If you have resolved to lose weight, keep track of how much you lose each week. If you don’t or want to participate in the food portion, you can collect non-perishable food items and drop them off at the RCHE suite. For every pound of weight participants lose, RCHE will donate at least one pound of food to Food Finders.
How to participate
All you need to keep track of each week is pounds lost during that week. You may e-mail your results to Mary Schultz, schultm@purdue.edu, and she can keep track of it with either your name or a nickname. No one’s individual results will be posted or identified with a certain person.
Timeline
The Food for Pounds challenge begins on January 12 and runs through March 16.
Extra food? We’ll take it.
Any food gathered beyond the pounds lost will also be donated to Food Finders. Check out our next newsletter to see how many pounds were lost and how much food was gathered.
Questions?
Contact Mary Schultz, schultm@purdue.edu or (765) 494-9828.
back to top |
